APN Outdoor ups Adshel bid to $540 million
The bidding war for Adshel has taken another turn with APN Outdoor increasing its bid to $540 million this morning.
APN Outdoor’s bid is an increase on its $500 million offer last month, which followed Ooh Media’s $470 million bid for the company a few weeks earlier. 
The revised offer sees APN offering 54.1 million shares, valued at $310 million, and $230 million in cash for 100% of the HT&E owned company.
In its announcement to the ASX this morning, APN Outdoor – itself subject to a $1.2 billion takeover bid from French out-of-home giant JC Decaux – said it will fund the cash component of the offer by taking on further debt.
The company also said it expects to realise cost savings of $15 million a year in the merged operations should the deal go ahead.
APN’s offer for Adshel comes as one of Australia’s largest out-of-home deals, the City of Sydney’s $500 million street furniture contract, comes up for tender.
“An acquisition of Adshel’s street furniture assets, combined with APN Outdoor’s transit and billboard platforms, represents an important strategic expansion for APN Outdoor,” the statement said.
APN Outdoor’s chief executive officer and managing director, James Warburton, added: “The acquisition of Adshel would represent an important step in our strategy to expand APN Outdoor, deliver new solutions and ideas to our advertisers and generate long-term, sustainable growth for our shareholders.
“There is an opportunity for us to use our expertise in large-scale digital developments to support the roll-out of digital across Adshel’s street furniture format, particularly in Australia. We expect this would enable us to bring digital to a broader range of advertisers and complement our existing product offering to those advertisers.
“The combination of Adshel and APN Outdoor also represents an opportunity to realise meaningful cost synergies through the rationalisation of duplication across management, sales and back-office functions.”
